[pacman-dev] Translation of man pages

[Mario Blättermann]

Hello Allan,

it's now more than three months ago that we discussed the move of the
man page translations into the upstream tree. Would be nice if you
would apply my patches (to get Po4a properly working) and extend the
Transifex project accordingly. That's all for the time being; this way
translators have enough time to work on the new files. Integration
into the Autotools/Meson toolchain could be done later.

Best Regards,
Mario


Am Do., 3. Juni 2021 um 09:17 Uhr schrieb Mario Blättermann
<mario.blaettermann at gmail.com>:
>
> Hello Allan,
>
> Am Do., 3. Juni 2021 um 06:09 Uhr schrieb Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org>:
> >
> > On 22/5/21 2:51 am, Mario Blättermann wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > the translation help page [1] says:
> > >
> > > ---
> > > There are currently no efforts underway to include translated manual
> > > pages in the pacman codebase. However, this is not to say translations
> > > are unwelcome. If someone has experience with i18n man pages and how
> > > to best include them with our source, please contact the pacman-dev
> > > mailing list at pacman-dev at archlinux.org.
> > > ---
> > >
> > > OK, then let me introduce my approach.
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > Thanks - this approach looks good to me.  We had someone on IRC suggest
> > the same approach independently of this patch too!
> >
> > Just checking before I pull all this together:
> >
> > 1) are you happy is I use your name and email in the commit log.
> >
> Yes, of course.
>
> > 2) are the translated manpages published under any license?  Just making
> > sure that importing them does not create issues...
> >
> The manpages-l10n project publishes the translated man pages under
> GPLv3+. However, some downstream packagers decided to mention all the
> upstream licenses in their packages (see [1]), but as far as I can
> evaluate, our translations are - regarding the license - rather
> independent from the English originals. So using GPLv3+ in general
> should be a good choice. And the Pacman man pages are GPLed anyway.
>
> > 3) are there languages other than German, Brazilian Portuguese and
> > French already available?
>
> No, at least there's nothing known to me. Some years ago I started
> with the German translations from scratch, later the Brazilian
> Portuguese translations by Rafael were added, and then I found a few
> unmaintained and outdated French translations, residing in the AUR for
> a long time [2]. These I've imported and added to manpages-l10n.
>
> Note, to avoid file conflicts, it is important to have a deadline for
> the inclusion of translated man pages in Pacman itself. As soon as
> they are available from the official package, I need to roll out a
> bugfix release of manpages-l10n without the Pacman .po files.
>
> BTW, due to the latest changes in libalpm, we don't have static
> asciidoc sources anymore. I don't know how we could generate
> translation templates within the Doxygen workflow, maybe it is
> impossible at all. AFAIK, the only output format usable with Po4a is
> »man page« [3]. Just an idea: To get a translation template for the
> libalpm man pages, we let Doxygen generate some temporary *roff files
> and use po4a to create an extra template on the fly which we provide
> on Transifex. I anyway think it makes sense to split the translations
> into an end user part (sections 1, 5, 8) and a developer part (section
> 3). But there's no need to host the template in the Git repo -- the
> Pacman tarball would only ship .po files (if any) and create the
> translated versions downstream. But let's focus on the Asciidoc based
> man pages first and get them properly working; the Libalpm stuff can
> be done later.
>
> [1] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/man-pages-l10n/raw/rawhide/f/man-pages-l10n.spec
> [2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/man-pages-pacman-fr/
> [3] https://www.doxygen.nl/manual/output.html
>
> Best Regards,
> Mario